A Modern Witch Read online

  Nell: She could be a spellcaster, too. That would be a nice mix. Easier to coordinate a circle when you can send everyone a mental map of where a spell is headed.

  Jamie: There’s no way to know right now. She’ll need more training before we can assess that, of course. Sorry to repeat myself, but what do we do about training?

  Nell: What’s bothering you?

  Jamie: Right now, it’s just a gut feeling. I’ll go back and start some basic work with her on clearing and setting barriers, but I’m no good to her beyond a few lessons. If she’s as strong as I think she is, once she opens those channels a little, she’s going to need more training, and quickly.

  Moira: You have a point there. If she’s fairly sensitive, basic barriers aren’t going to be enough.

  Jamie: She lives in the middle of downtown Chicago—there are people everywhere. If her sensitivity is high and her barriers are shaky, that’s not something we can walk away from.

  Moira: Indeed. For her safety and theirs.

  Jamie: Exactly. I don’t want to leave her unable to function, and I sure as heck don’t want to leave her unstable and a danger to others.

  Nell: If it comes to that, we’ll figure something out. You’re just the first line.

  Jamie: Good point. I need some downtime, and then I’m headed back over for dinner. We’ll see where Chinese food and ice cream take us. First contact report complete, over and out.

  Nell clicked out of chat and rolled her mouse around aimlessly. Jamie didn’t get worried without good reason. He’d worked with plenty of trainee witches. Heck, he was Aervyn’s primary trainer. Power, even abundant power, wasn’t enough to make Jamie jumpy.

  Maybe Lauren’s legs were just too distracting. Knowing Jamie, that was the real problem.

  ...

  Nothing was more delicious than a Saturday afternoon nap on the best couch in the world. Lauren stretched in contentment and considered rolling over for a second dose of lethargy.

  She’d earned it this morning. Coffee-bearing witches who could talk in your head and long-distance snoop into your nail polish collection were hard work.

  It was still possible this was all Jamie. His mind magic, his apparently very real powers. She definitely preferred that theory.

  Unfortunately, if it were true, it meant three women in a chat room and a guy in California had formed this wacko conspiracy to convince a sane woman she was a witch. Her ego just wasn’t big enough to think she was the chosen target of a very odd witch hunt.

  What was that Sherlock Holmes line? Eliminate the impossible and whatever’s left, however weird, must be true. Something like that.

  So, maybe she had some feeble telepathy. In Jamie’s world, that made her a witch. In her world, it probably just made her a better realtor. She had good gut instincts, and really, how much bigger a stretch was it to think your brain could sense things, if you believed your guts could?

  Lauren rolled over and decided to take nap part two after all.

  …

  Nat danced her way down Lauren’s street. Three yoga classes today, all packed to the rafters. Spirit Yoga was making its mark. There was nothing she liked better than taking a group of people and sending them all home more limber and centered than when they’d arrived.

  Growing up, she never could have imagined a life this happy. Or—she laughed at herself—one so much at odds with what was expected of a Smythe. Teaching yoga might not raise eyebrows in some families, but in hers, it was up there with joining a cult or hitting the local bar for karaoke night. Fairly close to unthinkable.

  And never mind yoga—she was apparently about to have dinner with a witch. That probably set a new Smythe record for profoundly inappropriate behavior. Shallow, maybe, but she enjoyed her little part in rebalancing the family karma.

  Not that she needed any more reasons to come to dinner. Lauren had asked, and that was enough.

  She was very curious about Lauren’s witch. Magical mind powers and floating plates. And some kind of mind-reading practice. It was going to be a fascinating dinner.

  …

  “Better. You still need to relax and open your channels more, but that was better.” Jamie twisted a little to relieve the kinks in his spine. He and Lauren had been sitting on her floor for over an hour, working on the most basic of mind-magic exercises—opening and closing mental channels.

  “Your barriers are still really rigid. Don’t think of them as a wall—more like a soft and flexible bubble. When you want to block most things and keep the emotions and thoughts of others at a distance, you inflate the bubble. To be more sensitive, you deflate the bubble and pull it in tighter, so you can read what’s outside more clearly. Very rarely do you want to let go of the bubble entirely; that leaves you completely vulnerable.”

  “It’s a wonder I’ve survived for twenty-eight years,” Lauren said wryly.

  “Oh, your current barriers are effective enough. You likely don’t pick up much that you don’t want to hear. But to truly use mind magics, you also need to be able to choose when to open and when to send. You can’t do that with the clunky walls you currently have in place. You need more refined tools.”

  “Bricks, bubbles, pink feathers. I guess I still don’t really see the point.”

  “It will make more sense when your friend Nat gets here. I’ll support your barrier control while you try some simple sending and receiving with her. Then you’ll see the difference between bricks and bubbles, trust me. Let’s try the bubble one more time.”

  Jamie patiently walked Lauren through the deepening of quiet mind and sending breath to her mental barriers, floating her bubble on a wave of breath. With a quiet mental touch, he encouraged her to slowly deflate the bubble. Good—she was doing better this time.

  Different students needed different visualizations. For some, bricks worked just fine. Bubbles weren’t his favorite—he always imagined them popping—but they seemed to be working for Lauren.

  Deep in concentration, neither of them heard Nat let herself in the front door. Jamie sensed her first, a new presence at the edge of the training circle he’d cast.

  Not wanting to jar Lauren while she was so exposed, he sent Nat a gentle mental signal to stop. He was grateful that she didn’t seem at all distressed by voices in her head. Perhaps his trainee could take some cues from her friend. Splitting his energies, he held the bond with Lauren steady and opened the training circle to allow Nat in.

  Then he slowly opened his eyes and saw Nat for the first time.

  Lauren felt her head explode. Brain-pounding tsunamis of feeling. Shock. Desire. Fear. Acceptance. Love.

  Jamie felt the dropped connection in his head as he heard Lauren hit the floor. Out cold. Oh, shit.

  Nat was beside Lauren in an instant. She reached for her friend and turned big eyes to Jamie. “Help her. What happened?”

  He looked at Nat. His control was tighter now, so the tidal wave wasn’t quite as big. But he knew, absolutely knew, that she was the rest of his life. And he was pretty sure the backwash of his reaction had hit Lauren down her wide-open channels.

  With the training of thirty years, he snapped his barriers in tight. He sent out a finger of power to monitor Lauren and heaved a breath of relief. “Simple overload. Nothing too serious, but she needs to sleep for a bit. Where’s her bed?”

  Jamie picked up Lauren and followed Nat down the hallway. He laid Lauren down gently on the bed and sat beside her. His legs weren’t feeling too steady either, and he couldn’t blame it on newbie-witch status.

  Breathing to center himself, he closed his eyes and reached gently for Lauren’s mind. He was no healer, but all witch trainers learned the basic spellwork to treat symptoms of power overload. He calmed and closed her channels, and sent her deeper into sleep.

  When he opened his eyes, Nat sat on the other side of Lauren’s bed, her legs wrapped into the easy lotus pose that only came with long practice.

  “She’s fine—she just needs rest.”

 
They sat together for a moment, listening to Lauren’s peaceful breathing.

  Nat had a very restful mind, and a very open one. Her single thought was crystal clear to Jamie. Every life had some really big turning points, and her closest friend in the world had obviously just crashed headlong into one.

  That about covered it, thought Jamie. And she isn’t the only one.

  He spoke quietly to Nat. “You can sit with her—that will be calming. She’ll be starving when she wakes up. We’ll let her sleep for an hour or so, and then she’ll need to eat. I’ll go order Chinese.”

  …

  Jamie walked into the kitchen, took out his cell phone, and then just sank into a chair. His very weak and totally unpredictable precog talent had picked a hell of a time to put in an appearance.

  One look at Nat and he’d been overwhelmed with vision fragments of their future life together. Their potential future life. Precognition showed possibilities, not certainties.

  Screw that. It had felt freaking certain.

  Dancing at the Shattuck in downtown Berkeley, Nat’s face full of laughter and invitation. Christmas morning with his family. Sunrise yoga together, and the wildly improbable sense that he actually enjoyed it.

  Nat’s belly rounded with their first baby.

  Building a snowman in their front yard with a toddler that looked shockingly like Aervyn. And damn it all to hell and back, because it didn’t snow in Berkeley. It snowed in Chicago, where he would live with Nat, at least one very cute kid, and a snowman.

  Where he would love Nat, and a little boy, with shocking fierceness.

  He’d been hit by all of that while holding someone else’s mental channels in his hands. Unbelievably bad timing.

  Generally he was pretty laid back about training incidents. Shit happened, and when you trained witches, it happened fairly frequently. Cleaning up spell misfires, healing minor injuries, pulling innocent bystanders out of the way—all part of the job description.

  Jamie leaned his head back against the wall. He could try to pretend this was a training incident, but really, Lauren had just been an innocent bystander. Any mind witch within a mile would have felt the shock waves of a precog episode that strong. Lauren had been pretty much at ground zero, and unbarriered.

  It had, however, answered a very important question. Only a mind witch of major proportions would have been able to absorb that kind of tidal wave with only a relatively mild case of overload. Lauren was going to be a very powerful witch.

  And he’d just blasted her channels wide open.

  Chapter 7

  Lauren walked into the kitchen with Nat close behind. “I could eat half of Chicago, and I feel like my brain got hit by a bus. What the heck happened?”

  Jamie, well versed in the needs of trainee witches, shoved a carton of food in her hands. “Eat. That will help with the head. Then we’ll talk.”

  Nat took a plate out of the cupboard, and then stood watching in amazement as Lauren began to vacuum-suck lo mein straight out of the carton. Jamie watched her reaction with amusement. Clearly Lauren didn’t usually eat like a starving teenage boy.

  He handed Nat a carton as well. “Dig in. Trust me—you want to get to it before she does.”

  Jamie looked at the stranger he would love and the witch he’d just begun to train. Now what the hell did he do?

  He had a very tricky conversation coming up with each of them, and he wasn’t sure he felt equipped to handle either one. He bit into an egg roll and decided Nell had no idea how big she was going to owe him.

  Let’s handle it like a complex spell, he thought. One step at a time, and try not to break anything too critical.

  “The head doing better, Lauren?”

  “Yeah.” Lauren spoke around mouthfuls of her second carton of lo mein. “Food’s helping. You the genius who ordered enough food for ten people?”

  “Yeah. Trainee witches are always hungry.”

  “Smart man. You going to share those egg rolls?”

  Jamie ran a quick scan on Lauren just in time to hear her pick up Nat’s thought. He called her a witch and she didn’t even blink.

  “It’s a long story, Nat.”

  Nat frowned. “Was I talking out loud?”

  “Oh, shit. I can hear you thinking.” Lauren turned to Jamie, rising panic on her face. “I can hear her thinking. What happened to me?”

  Jamie sent out as much calm as he dared. “Your channels overloaded. Too much input. When that happens, people often end up extra-sensitive for a few days. Just like it was hard to soften your mental barriers before, now it’s going to take some work to put them back up. Until you do, you’ll pick up at least the outer layer of thoughts and emotions from people around you.”

  “Okay.” Lauren nodded very slowly, but still looked skeptical. “Why can’t I hear you?”

  “I’ve got barriers up. It’s what we were working on when you overloaded.” He turned to Nat. “With your permission, I can help strengthen your barriers as well. Too many stray thoughts are going to be hard for Lauren to handle right now.”

  At Nat’s nodded assent, Jamie slipped quietly into contact with her mind. He took just a moment to soak in her amazingly serene energy, and then gently fortified her barriers.

  “That should take care of it for a few hours. It’s not a total block; it will just soften what gets through. Lauren, as soon as we’re done eating, we’ll go work on getting your channels closed back up some.”

  Lauren waved her chopsticks like a weapon. “Nuh uh. Not a chance I’m playing that game with you again until I know what the heck happened the first time. It felt like my head exploded.”

  Jamie sighed. “That was my fault, and I owe you a big apology. It’s the trainer’s job to make sure the energy flows stay manageable, and I totally blew it.”

  “That was more than a bit unmanageable.”

  Jamie could see the lines still creasing her forehead. “Head’s still bad, isn’t it. Do you have some ibuprofen or something? That will help.”

  Lauren walked out of the room, a third carton of lo mein in her hands.

  …

  Finally full after three cartons of lo mein and four egg rolls, Lauren sprawled on her couch beside Nat and eyed Jamie. “So, back to the big question. What the hell happened?”

  “I have some ideas,” Jamie said, “but I’d like to gather a little more data first. I need you to try to think back and tell me exactly what you remember, what you felt.”

  “I was concentrating, trying to shrink my bubble.” She looked at Nat. “You’d be better at it than I am. It’s a lot like the breathing and meditation stuff you do.”

  Nat looked puzzled. “Bubble?”

  Jamie beat her to an explanation. “It’s the first lesson for mind witches. The goal is to create flexible barriers where Lauren can control what passes in and out of her mind.”

  “Lauren is a mind witch?”

  Go, Nat, thought Lauren. Mind witch, feeble telepath, whatever. If it could make her pass out on the floor, she must have something, but she wasn’t happy about it.

  Jamie nodded and watched Nat steadily. “I think so. We were going to do some more testing tonight to make sure, but non-witches don’t overload.”

  Nat grinned at Lauren. “You lead an interesting life, girl.”

  Lauren could see Jamie’s obvious relief. That was interesting. Or maybe not. Most friendships would probably be a little rocked by ‘hey, your pal’s a witch’. She elbowed Nat. “I think Jamie was worried you might abandon ship.”

  Jamie looked shocked. “You heard that?”

  He thinks I read his mind. Silly witch. Lauren hugged a pillow. “No funky mind magic required. I bet you suck at poker. It’s not Nat you have to worry about taking a hike on this whole witch thing. It’s me.”

  Jamie grimaced. “Yeah, I got that. So, let’s get back to what happened. You were working on deflating your bubble…”

  “It felt like it was going better than the previous times. I cou
ld feel you there, kind of holding things steady, but that’s all I got from you at first…” Lauren slowed down as she mentally walked through what had happened next.

  She glared at Jamie. “Wait a minute. I assumed I’d overloaded myself, lost control of something. But it came from you. This huge wave of stuff came from you. What the hell happened?”

  He looked at her steadily. “You’re right. It wasn’t anything you did. I lost control for a moment, and unfortunately, with how tightly we were hooked together, some of it pushed to you. As I said before, that shouldn’t happen, and I’m sorry for it.”

  “I thought Nell sent you because you’re good at this.” Lauren was more than a little scared that a half-competent witch had been inside her head. With her permission, no less.

  Jamie sighed. “I’m very good. That wasn’t the problem. You remember when I walked you through the different kinds of power? My talents are primarily with elemental energies, but I also have a little bit of most of the others. That’s part of what makes me a good trainer—I can do a little bit of everything. Unfortunately, one of the talents I have is weak and very occasional precog.”

  “Precog?”

  Nat leaned forward on the couch. “You see the future?”

  If one of them had to be a witch, thought Lauren, it should have been Nat. She’d be way better prepared.

  Jamie shrugged. “Precog’s not that clear, which makes it a really frustrating talent. You see possible futures, and not necessarily the most probable. I just get small flashes usually, brief glimpses. This was longer and more powerful than usual. It only happens once or twice a year. The timing just really sucked.”

  He could see the future? That was entirely creepy. “So I got brain-smacked by a totally random event?”

  Jamie sighed. “No, it wasn’t random. Precog events usually have a trigger.”

  Lauren waited through a long silence. Jamie looked decidedly uncomfortable. “Ah, you going to fill me in? What was the trigger?”